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Join us in Gambier, Ohio, on Friday-Saturday, Nov. 10-11, for this year’s Kenyon Review Literary Festival, a celebration of the best in contemporary writing. Highlights include a Friday-night reading by Nate Marshall, a joint reading on Saturday by Elissa Washuta and Nick White, the annual sidewalk sale of literary magazines and small-press books, and a screening of the film Brooklyn, based on the novel by Colm Tóibín. Tóibín, the widely acclaimed writer who won this year’s Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, will deliver the Denham Sutcliffe Memorial Lecture on Saturday night, and will sign books afterwards. Festival events are free and open to the public. Check out the complete schedule of events here.

Why We Chose It

BY GEETA KOTHARI, NONFICTION EDITOR

“How to Mourn” by Tyrese L. Coleman appears in the Nov/Dec 2017 issue of the Kenyon Review.

The narrator in Tyrese L. Coleman’s essay “How to Mourn” announces her problem immediately. “If you read my fiction, you will find a character named Grandma. In real life, she is dead. This is the story of her death. A story this writer, the main character—T—began drafting the moment she knew Grandma was not long for this earth. A story more like a performance—the sensation of watching yourself from outside your own body, when everything feels unreal, like living in a dream.” Most writers will recognize this moment when the need to narrate overrides the lived experience, so that the writer is performing life rather than living it. Read the rest of “Why We Chose It.”

Young Poets: Your Deadline Looms!

November 30 is the submission deadline for the Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers, open to high school sophomores and juniors around the world. The winner receives a full scholarship to the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop, and the winning poem—as well as runner-up poems—will be published in the Nov/Dec 2018 issue of the Review. Find contest details here.

Applications Open in January for Summer Writers Workshops

Accomplished and aspiring writers alike have raved about the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops, where they’re encouraged to stretch their abilities, generating fresh work under the guidance of superb instructors. In 2018, we’re again including nature writing in our lineup, along with workshops in fiction, poetry, literary nonfiction, spiritual writing, and translation. Online applications open in January. Start planning now!

The new issue of the Kenyon Review is full of discoveries. Of particular note: “Cowboys & Aliens,” by Kevin Young, an excerpt from his forthcoming book about the great American tradition of the hoax. This issue also includes a striking group of decidedly contemporary sonnets by Pulitzer Prize finalist Diane Seuss, as well as a mesmerizing story by Anna Hartford in which astronomy provides a metaphorical lens through which a rocky love affair unfolds. Other authors in this issue include Vanessa Cuti and Lauren Schenkman (fiction), along with Bruce Smith, Analicia Sotelo, William Logan, and Monica Sok (poetry). Pick up the latest KR and dive in. Subscribe or order a print or digital copy today!

Resistance, Change, Survival: “All Who Would Have Seen Us Dead” by Alison Stine

Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Díaz talks to Kenyon College Associate Professor of English Ivonne M. García about expressing his political views on Facebook, an emerging New America, the significance of ghosts and the Gothic, and the fukú, or the idea of being cursed. Listen to it!

From KROnline: “Loving Homes for Lost & Broken Men”

BY ALLEGRA HYDE

I took in my first foster husband when I was thirty-eight. I knew, by then, that I would never have a husband of my own, and I wanted to do some good in the world. Fostering these abandoned men was a way to give back. There are so many husbands lost in system—you don’t hear about them much, but they’re there—so many husbands looking for a forever home. I would be the one to help. Read the story.

From the KR Blog: An Interview with T Clutch Fleischmann

BY AYLA MAISEY

October 5, 2017

I love journals and read writers’ journals all the time. The journal is a really great form and in nonfiction, it gets discounted a bit; people think of it as a private thing—which is weird because we’re already dealing with personal essays and this relationship between the private and the public. I don’t really have a journaling practice that I distinguish from my writing practice. I try to write most every day and to write from a very immediate space; whatever enters into my life naturally is what ends up on the page. Read the interview.

A Micro-Conversation with Cintia Santana

Santana’s poem, “Hum,” appears along with another poem in the Sept/Oct 2017 issue of the Kenyon Review.

It’s possible I owe it to my poor hearing! I keep a list of mishearings that I find interesting. While I rarely use these in my writing, I think the habit is a bit like practicing scales for me. Spanish is my first language, and because I grew up bilingual, I’ve long been hyperaware of near sounds and near words; I’m fascinated by the ways in which one letter added to—or taken away from—a word can change its meaning, its sound, even the language to which it belongs. Read the entire interview.